I’m pretty happy with FP10: great that with we now have up-to-date Eclipse/ Java/ OSGi version. Despite some obvious glitches it works reasonably well for me. But if you read the blogs and follow Twitter: a lot of people are having issues. The current ‘gold’ version would have been a great beta (2) and with a couple of fixes a great release.

I can confirm that I also have most of the issues described in this blog post (and more). I also can/ really want to elaborate on them by providing more info/ screenshots just to make FP10 better.
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​But… although I appreciate IBM (ArnazR) asking for more info in one of the more recent comments I don’t think that is the place. I also support software and absolutely hate it when people introduces new issues in a comments section.
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​Creating PMR’s is way too much overhead. It is mentioned that a PMR exists for most issues. Can I simply add more info with just a line of text? Add a screenshot in under a minute? I don’t think so. Since I’m a consultant/ business partner and not a customer, I can’t even create PMR’s (seriously?). Don’t want to bother one of my customers for it neither.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a simple way to log the issue we’re having with FP10? Just have a look at the Github issues section for inspiration. ​The delivery model for Notes/ Domino has changed in light of what the rest of the world is doing. I think it’s time the support model follows.

PS. For ArnazR: have a look at the screenshot. I would also say that this help screen looks ‘curious’).

I’m into performance at the moment, trying to solve some nasty issues in one of the applications I work on. While researching the topic I came across Karsten Lehmann’s Domino JNA project that allows you to use some low-level C-API methods using Java. It contains functions that are very useful in my scenario, but I also wondered how the library performed. So I wrote some basic tests, comparing JNA with the ‘standard’ (or ‘legacy’) Domino API and, while I was at it, the org.openntf.domino (ODA) API.

So I wrote a couple of tests using the 3 APIs that traverse a view from the well known ‘Fakenames’ database. It is based on the Domino Name & Address book template and contains 40,000 documents. The tests will loop through a view called ‘People’ containing all the documents and will read a value from one of the columns.

Time to see for yourself! I created a simple application that allows you to test the different methods and view the results (latest 10 are shown only): take a look here.

The source code of the application and test code can be found here. The environment: CentOS 6 (64 bit), SSD, 1GB RAM, Domino 901FP5 (64 bit), ExtLib 17, ODA 3.2.1, JNA 0.9.5. Please let me know if I made any errors in the tests.

I don’t know what about you, but the results surprised me! I didn’t expect the overhead of the non-standard APIs to be that big. In every day use I guess this won’t affect your applications a lot, but it’s something you definitely have to be aware of if you needs to squeeze just a bit more performance out of your application.

UPDATE

– Upgraded the JNA project to 0.9.5
– Based on Andy Cunliffe’s comment I’ve added a new test using a ‘manual’ Java loop in the ODA:

ViewEntry ve = nav.getFirst();
while (null != ve) {

// code here

ve = nav.getNext();
}

That code seems to run about 30% faster that a standard Java loop in ODA:

I was doing some work with an Angular application talking to the IBM Connections API. More specifically: I wanted to show and create activities based on some user input.

The Connections API is pretty complex, so I normally run some ‘manual’ tests first based on the documentation, and then use those result to write the code to call the API. My preferred application for that is Postman.

While running the tests in Postman I ran into a big issue. All GET and PUT requests came through fine, but I wasn’t able to create anything using a POST request to the API: every request I made returned a 403 error:

The funny thing was that using the same credentials, I could create items using the web interface just fine. My first thought was that it must be some strange access control setting hidden away deep in a config file (“don’t allow users to create stuff using the API”), but then I found someone with a similar issue on StackOverflow. And I found this IBM Technote. So, apparently there’s something fishy going on with Postman.

So by enabling the Chrome Developer tools for Postman, I was able to look at the exact HTTP request that Postman sends. And I found the Origin header that was already mentioned in the StackOverflow post:

Origin: chrome-extension://fhbjgbiflinjbdggehcddcbncdddomop

Turns out that IBM Connections doesn’t really like that. That’s by design and has something to do with cross-site request forgery.. Using a curl command I could easily bypass the header and confirm that it was indeed the cause of my problem.

So the only thing left (since I like testing with Postman), was to figure out how to change that Origin header. The header is one of the ‘restricted’ headers that is automatically added by the browser (Chrome) and can’t be easily changed. Luckily, the people at Postman also thought of that and created the “Postman Interceptor“: a Chrome extension that sits as a sort of proxy between your Postman requests. After enabling that in Postman I was able to change the Origin header of my requests. I set it to the hostname of the IBM Connections server and voila: happy times!

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Hi !

I'm Mark Leusink, co-owner of Viaware (experts in Food Contact Safety and creators of FOCOS). I also work as a freelance web developer/ consultant, specialising in IBM (Lotus) Notes/ Domino/ XPages/ AngularJS/ mobile/ Java/ app development, speaker, IBM Champion (2011-2015). I live in the Netherlands and work for various national and international clients.

Looking for an expert in IBM XPages or Domino, web, client, mobile? Or need assistance in using any of my open source projects? Contact me.